Silent Hill f Review

A young high school girl trapped in the miasmic, psychosexual nightmare, Shimizu Hinako’s struggle through small-town streets and folklore-titled hellscapes is aesthetically new ground for the Silent Hill series but structurally immediately familiar. The impenetrable fog may give way to suffocating blooms and the Americana iconography dismantled in favour of Shinto architecture, but the bones of the thing ache and groan in the same ways. Though new hairline fractures splinter throughout.

Obligatory paths are laid out for the player with snaking environments dotted with puzzles dutifully prepared by hands that are either unsteady or simply uninterested in meaningful assembly. At best, Silent Hill f’s rote exploration is permissible as earnest genre emulation from a studio attempting to find its own cadence and sense of space. And certainly, there are moments of genuinely affecting art direction found in otherwise workmanlike play spaces, but there’s an intangible lack to Silent Hill f’s haunted halls, the compulsive, sticky, wet call of its contemporaries’ worlds almost entirely absent here.

Exploration of Silent Hill f’s unique setting becomes all but actively repellent as it moves again and again to layer the experience with relentless combat encounters. Grabbing a stray pipe or crowbar, the player is encouraged to swing away, Hinako, as a balancing act of stamina, health, sanity, weapon durability, and manoeuvrability goes horribly awry. It’s not a question of fun; a young woman’s physical struggle against monstrous manifestations of her deepest fears shouldn’t be fun to play, but neither should it be this demonstrably unsatisfying. Sheepishly handwaved away as narratively appropriate, Hinako’s clumsy, inaccurate melee skills are frustratingly met by a game heavily invested in combat as language, from action genre inspired boss encounters to aggressive meter management.

It is a fundamentally incorrect read on the part of the game, reeking of a design doc that wants the accolades of adult storytelling without sacrificing the adolescent impulse to have every girl imagined also be equipped with a perfect dodge. Silent Hill f’s closest comparison point being Zach Snyder’s Suckerpunch should have given someone, somewhere pause.

Each of Silent Hill f’s ill-considered systems interlock to make for a consistently grating experience. Your several meters need to be tampered with consumables, each taking up a limited inventory also shared by collectibles that are traded in at save points for a ‘faith’ currency used to upgrade those meters or spent to spin for a randomly generated passive ability. It is as goofy and gamified as it reads. You’re also aiming for perfect dodges to trigger slowdowns, but Hinako’s stilted reach combined with enemies’ rapid, gap-closing animations mean that flow and control of the space never quite feels right. You could argue this is meant to be thematically relevant, but cutting my finger on a book page doesn’t make it any more compelling, it just makes a mess.

Silent Hill f’s aesthetics are consistently gorgeous 

Playing deliberately coy with its own plot and ideas, Silent Hill f insists on multiple playthroughs to fully appreciate the tale it’s attempting to weave from its compelling, uncompromising threads. Perhaps the game’s fatal wound, its systemic failures disincentive repeated runs, the idea of having to wade through yet another six-to-eight hours of gruelling combat enough to send anyone running for the titular hill. Worse still, each additional layer of context via New Game + moves you further and further away from the elements of Silent Hill f that do work.

Silent Hill f is about these things but stops short of actively engaging with the nuances of feminine shame, desire, and the maelstrom that often occurs in the space between. Hinako is less character and more collection of traits prescribed to gendered tales of otherness; her quirks fit neatly in bullet points and her flaws are either woven around or cartoonishly exaggerated. There are several moments in the initial run that are abstract enough to invite interpretation and in these, Silent Hill f is heir apparent to Silent Hill 2; a series of uncompromisingly grim and ugly choices made by an unknowable entity of a protagonist with intent to make you ask why.

Silent Hill 2’s multiple endings also required several playthroughs (or at least save file manipulation) to achieve, but these alternate outcomes were decidedly not about altering the thematic and tonal thrust of James Sunderland’s masculine nightmare. The core of that journey written as such to be an immovable fact on which the game could build thesis, catharsis, and commentary. In Silent Hill f, each new ending fundamentally warps the events of the story, shifting it away from the abstract, plausible deniability of its initial tale into something far more knowable and far less emotionally engaging.

Even within the areas that work best, Silent Hill f struggles to grasp the depth and complexity of what it’s doing. Where Hinako is underwritten, her supporting cast are all but non-existent, the potential to explore multiple perspectives on the struggles of young women and society at large, eschewed for increasingly strained metaphors and plotting. In the version of Silent Hill f that allows Hinako to get ugly, the distinction between those who are and aren’t subject to societal issues being the dividing line of ’protagonist’ could make for something special, but Silent Hill f is unwilling, and unable, to push its commentary in directions other than palatable.

Combat is a nightmare in and of itself

Silent Hill f’s ‘true’ ending begins to toy with grander ideation of its societal commentary but is equally concerned with contorting f’s standalone, intensely adult, tale into Reddit approved content. The story is also structured in such a way as to deny itself the benefits of distinct perspectives; fantasy author Robin Hobb frequently writes about the violent oppression of women in her books but within that framework, she allows space for myriad types of women and minorities to experience, and react to, those systems of power. Silent Hill f is so focused on its idealised Hinako that it leaves its other women well behind, more nuance and grace afforded to the men surrounding her than her friends and family.

Final Thoughts

Conceptually, Silent Hill f is every bit the fascinating, uncomfortable step forward the series has needed for a long time. Its deployment of iconography, theme, and tone is both in keeping with what makes the Silent Hill titles so endearing and radically subversive for the genre space (at least within games). To balk at its gendered tale is to balk at the idea of Silent Hill itself. But Silent Hill f needs to exist beyond its concept; its ideas and commentary too weighted to celebrate for simply being there, and its systemic failures too omnipresent to not feel all the while. Silent Hill f is the step forward Silent Hill needs; it’s a shame it was onto such unstable ground.

Reviewed on PS5  // Review code supplied by publisher

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